In one of my former lives, I worked as a PC Technician at a Boy Scout office (and down the street at the Girl Scout office). It was a surprisingly difficult job because there is no centralized software that the organization uses. Each region office, section office, council office, and troop has to develop its own software to keep track of everything. I remember Microsoft Access databases that would make you cry.

They’ve finally wised up and realized that they can take advantage of an enormous resource. Their alumni. The Boy Scouts of America (BSA) are reaching out and asking for open-source programmers that might want to help out to write a slew of programs that could be readily available for all Scouts, both adult and youth. They’ve launched a new site, the Open Source Initiative, which is looking to help solve their biggest problem – creating software for over 121,000 local scout troops to handle all the activities they carry out.

The decision to go with open-source was simple; as it can be tailored to fit the specific needs of the particular group using it and the Scouts know that they have more than a few tech-savvy alums. There are concerns, though, that a large corporation like Microsoft may step in and develop all of the programs for a large check, thereby preventing the would-be coders from helping out.

If it comes to that, the BSA wouldn’t have much of a choice as they need that software yesterday.